


down in the forest

by nutelladownpour



Series: Joshler High School AUs [4]
Category: Twenty One Pilots
Genre: Angst, Fire, M/M, Sad, Underage Smoking, its sad, sad sad sad its so sad, treehouse, um idk how to tag this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-07
Updated: 2015-06-07
Packaged: 2018-04-03 09:29:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4095841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nutelladownpour/pseuds/nutelladownpour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He held a neon pink lighter tightly in his hand, looking down at it as he flicked it again, a small flame appearing at the top.<br/>“Cut it out Josh!"</p>
            </blockquote>





	down in the forest

**Author's Note:**

> so i have to write 30,000 words for my writing exam and all of somebody catch my breath is in it and so is this so enjoy this xx
> 
> btw its sad

I looked around in confusion at the clicking sound that seemed to echo throughout the small space. My eyes landed on Josh, my best friend and the source of the sound. He held a neon pink lighter tightly in his hand, looking down at it as he flicked it again, a small flame appearing at the top. “Cut it out Josh,” I scolded, swatting at his arm. “We are in a wooden house, in a  tree, in a forest.”

 

Josh laughed, shaking his head at me but slipping the lighter into his pocket anyway. He usually didn’t give in to my paranoia, but seeing as though we were literally surrounded by flammables, he listened. It had been years since we had found this place, a little wooden treehouse perfectly located right in between our houses in the woods. A short ten minute walk for each of us to meet there, which we had been doing every day since we were twelve. Back then, finding a secret fort just for you and your best friend was probably the coolest thing ever, and we still thought so.

 

Since we had claimed it as our own, the treehouse had become personalized to us. We had dragged the abandoned furniture within a week, replacing it with old camp chairs and even a coffee table that Josh had taken from his grandparents. The place had become a second home to us, and the best was that nobody else knew about it. It was far back in the woods that you couldn’t see it from the road, and in the part of the woods so thick that it was nearly invisible unless you were right under it. Not to mention high up in the trees. We had no idea who had built it, or when for that matter, but it was ours.

 

The treehouse was home to many memories, both good and bad. The first time I broke a bone, missing a rung on the ladder and falling all the way to the bottom. I hadn’t cried, or so I said, and Josh helped me make up a good lie to feed my parents so they wouldn’t know that I had been playing in the woods. My first kiss, tentatively shared with Josh so we could both “get it out of the way.” We both knew that was a lie, and we both silently agreed to never talk about it again. And, possibly the worst of all, the first time that I saw Josh pull a cigarette from his pocket, the first one stolen from his dad, and slowly light it up.

 

Josh knew how I felt about him smoking, and we both knew that he didn’t care. The treehouse was the only place that he could smoke without his parents finding out, and I wasn’t pleased. I didn’t like the way that the smell seemed to cling to the walls, or the potential threat of an unplanned fire. He never smoked with me there, as if it really made anything better. I was just worried about him mostly, not wanting him to fill his lungs with poison, especially not in a place that was the definition of the word “childhood.”

 

“I have to go soon,” I mumbled, leaning back against the wall and sighing deeply. I didn’t want to go back home, where it got too loud sometimes and the walls reeked of cigarettes way more than the treehouse did, but mixed with the sweet stench of alcohol. I’d pick living in the treehouse with Josh and his few a day than continue to live in my house, what was supposedly my home. The treehouse was much more of a home to me, or maybe it was Josh that was my home.

 

“Mom might start to worry.” Lies. All I did was lie, to Josh, and to everybody. In the entire time I’d known Josh, he’d never been to my house. We hung out in the treehouse, and sometimes when it got too rainy, his house. Sleepovers weren’t a rare occurrence, but it was rare that I got permission for them. Most of the time, my mom didn’t even notice me when I was home, let alone if I was gone for a few days. I was almost an adult, I could do whatever I wanted. And what I wanted was to spend time with my best friend, in our treehouse.

 

Josh groaned in response, before nodding at my words. “Yeah, I guess you should get going then,” he sighed. “Wouldn’t want you to get in trouble, would we?”

 

I nodded back at him, standing up and grabbing my bag from the floor before beginning to carefully - I hadn’t trusted this ladder since I fell - climb down to the ground. “See you tomorrow?” I called up through the trapdoor in the floor, looking up at where Josh still held it open. I saw him nod, and I grinned back at him before he closed it. As I was walking back to my house through the thick trees, I could have sworn that I heard the clicking of a lighter.

 

Josh wasn’t at school the next day, not that it wasn’t a common thing. He liked to skip a lot, the result of the new group of friends that encouraged him that drinking and smoking were also cool things, and that I was not. I didn’t mind that he didn’t hang out with me at school much, because I knew that he was still my best friend. The real Josh wasn’t the one that I saw around school with the terrible lip ring that his friends thought looked cool, or the Josh that pushed past me in the hallway without looking up, or the one that had failed two easy courses just because he thought he was too good to show up to the classes.

 

The real Josh was the one that stayed up with me until two in the morning in the forest, without asking me why or needing an answer. The real Josh took the lip ring out when he wasn’t around his friends, because he hated it and he knew that he only got it to impress them, as if they would hate him if he didn’t have a hole through his lip. The real Josh asked me to help him catch up in every other class, and took the two he had failed during the summer so he could still graduate on time. The real Josh was my best friend, and I loved him. I was just patiently waiting for him to get his head out of his own ass so we could act like it again.

 

Then Josh wasn’t at school the next day. That was when I started to worry a bit, knowing that he rarely skipped two days in a row. Still, I knew that he would turn up sometime. I had bigger things to worry about than Josh off chain smoking with his friends. I didn’t want to deal with it, not right then. And then, on the third day that Josh didn’t show up for school, I got a phone call from his mother. My heart sank as she explained in a hushed tone that Josh had been missing, and that I was the last person that had seen him. It wasn’t rare for Josh to disappear for a day or two, but this was the longest that he’d been gone, and she was starting to worry about him. I told her that I would try to find out where he’d gone, and I was frozen in my place long after she had hung up.

 

The first place I looked was the treehouse. That was where we spent most of our time together, and I didn’t know why I hadn’t checked there days before. I had been so busy with studying that I hadn’t had time to go, and Josh usually texted me when he wanted to meet up. I made my way through the woods, walking slower than I usually would. I was scared that Josh wouldn’t be there, and then I would be back to square one. I’ll admit that I wasn’t completely there as I walked, and it was a few minutes before I realized that something was wrong.

 

Some of the trees around me were black, and the woods didn’t seem quite as thick as they had only three days earlier. My heart started racing as I picked up the pace, running through the woods and towards the treehouse. By the time I reached where it should have been, in a clearing that was once full of trees, I wished that I never would have gone there. The trees around the house were completely black, most of them charred so much that you couldn’t tell what they once were. The trees that had held the treehouse had snapped, and the remains of the now blackened wood were in pieces. The treehouse was no more, and Josh was nowhere to be seen.

 

The reality of what must have happened hit me like a brick, and I fell to the ground. I didn’t care in that moment that my pants would be covered in soot when I stood back up. I stared at the burnt remains of our little house, and I didn’t realize that I started to cry until my body was shaking with the force of the sobs that ripped through me. The treehouse was gone. My home was gone, just like that. I looked around madly, not exactly knowing what I was looking for until I found it. I stared at the hunk of melted plastic, the neon pink colour standing out like a siren in the blackness around it. It took me a minute to know what it was, and as soon as I realized, I had to turn around to be sick onto the charred remains of a tree stump.

  
Josh’s lighter.

**Author's Note:**

> so rr y


End file.
